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3 This is a study in the modern intellectual and cultural history of nostalgia— as a concept, idea, and experience. In the main, it will present this history as nostalgia’s theoretical history, through theoretical descriptions reflecting not only nostalgia’s changing meanings and intensities but also larger cultural shifts, on which the study builds a cumulative argument about nostalgia ’s modern significance. In structure, the book is made up of three parts. This first part, “Original Questions,” synthesizes on a philosophical level some of the questions surrounding nostalgia with an eye to my historical interrogations. I do so, in part, by turning to two foundational texts which I have turned to repeatedly in order to find my way, Ovid’s poetry of exile and Plato’s Symposium. Some of the perhaps unanswerable questions raised by these texts are never far from my material investigations in the main part, the individual chapters on nostalgia’s modern intellectual history as I have chosen to unfold it. The third part, “The End of Nostalgia,” is not a conclusion so much as a reinterpretation which uses nostalgia’s intellectual history as a basis from which to mount a philosophical defense of nostalgia with an eye to the problematic relation at the very heart of nostalgia’s modern history, its relation to the project of the Enlightenment and modernity. The book’s historical scope is perhaps best indicated by two brief quotes, roughly three hundred years apart. “Nostalgia admits no remedy other than a return to the homeland,” writes a young doctoral student in a medical dissertation of 1688, which gives birth to the modern name, nostalgia. “Nostalgia ” in 1688 is a new name for displacement, denoting not a sentimental longing but a deadly disease caught by and consuming those cut off from their homeland. Shuttle 300 years forward and we read in a newspaper Introduction Original Questions 4 Introduction headline of 2008: “Nostalgia vs Nouveau at London Fashion Week.”1 Today , it seems, anything not nouveau can already express nostalgia. Both these references to “nostalgia” imply much more than they explicitly suggest. Prima facie, the nostalgia announced by the newspaper headline was the return of “vintage brands,” especially that of “that high priestess of punk, Vivienne Westwood.” But this “nostalgia” was advertised mainly on account of the relation itself. Only against the nostalgia impersonated could the nouveau assume its character, and from the perspective of the nouveau the nostalgia could itself seem again: nouveau. A fashion show full of ironic and dexterous quotations, the exhibit also reproduced, transparently and self-consciously, the deeper logic of the postmodern. Far from attributing a higher value on either side, the show’s flaunting of the juxtaposition itself—“nostalgia versus nouveau”—was the material display of a postmodern situation in which the past survives not as itself but as its own simulacrum. The event announced was not even the return of nostalgia so much as fashion’s own free play with its own past, or rather its transformation into so many creative monologues with a past simulated and constructed as much as revised. It is debatable whether such “nostalgia,” quotable and recyclable at any place or time, still does express nostalgia. Critics have written of what is the only constant in fashion’s tireless need to fuel demand, the impulse to renew atmosphere, a motivation yet strangely unmotivated in and by the past it appropriates.2 By turning a seemingly diachronic contrast into a pastiche of simultaneity and parading the wearing of ostensibly opposed and yet stylistically interlocking masks, the fashion show drew attention primarily to itself, as an event expected to “generate£50 million in global media coverage.” This expectation signaled not least the material and synergistic intent of the event itself, its mediated transmission into a global space defined materially by its present accessibility. Essaying to track the postmodern situation at a time itself insecure whether there still is such a thing as a current situation, Fredric Jameson has said of the postmodern: “The producers of culture have nowhere to turn to but to the past: the imitation of dead styles, speech through all the masks and voices stored up in the imaginary museum of a now global culture .”3 In that sense, the fashion show was a visual reminder that not only the past but also our nostalgia for it can turn into a mere simulacrum, and that such simulated nostalgia may have the function only of simulating a stimulating ensemble...

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